Guo Moruo

Guo Moruo or Kuo Mo-jo (both: gwô` môrhwô`, –zhô`), 1892–1978, Chinese writer and scholar. He co-founded the Creation Society, which promoted a romantic style of writing. His love stories and experiments in free verse, particularly his poetry collection The Goddesses (1921), won immediate popularity. He wrote several historical plays, notably Ch'ü Yüan (1942), about the dissident poet of the 4th-century B.C.; Guo, an avowed Marxist, wrote it while living in territory controlled by the Nationalist Party. He also wrote numerous studies on Chinese archaeology, history, and literature. He served as a prominent government official from 1949 until his death.

Bibliography

See biography by D. T. Roy (1971).

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Guo Moruo

 or Kuo Mo-jo orig. Guo Kaizhen

(born Nov. 1892, Shawan, Luoshan county, Sichuan province, China—died June 12, 1978, Beijing) Chinese scholar and writer. In his youth he abandoned medical studies to devote himself to foreign literature, producing a popular translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1922). He wrote prolifically in every genre, including poetry, fiction, plays, nine autobiographical volumes, translations of Western works, and historical and philosophical treatises, including a monumental study of ancient inscriptions. Initially a liberal democrat, he became a Marxist in the 1920s, and his work was banned by the Guomindang. Following the 1949 revolution, he was named to the highest official literary positions and later to the presidency of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.